Mutual Information as a Measure of Coordination in Collaborative Interaction

We present an information-theoretic approach for quantifying the level of coordination between cooperating parties engaged in a computer-mediated collaborative interaction. The approach builds on Shannon’s mutual information, as a task-independent objective measure, which captures the level of corelation between the actions of interacting agents. We introduce the approach through two characteristic examples and discuss the challenges in designing a reliable measure and the amount of modelling effort required. Our initial results suggest the potential of this measure in supporting designers of collaborative systems and in providing more solid theoretical foundations for the science of Human-Computer Interaction.